


Maintaining Propriety

by a_term



Category: Hyperdimension Neptunia
Genre: F/F, book store
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 16:06:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13955142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_term/pseuds/a_term
Summary: Blanc is having a little bit of trouble with her hobby, she's a bit ashamed of it and everything around it.Vert isn't.





	Maintaining Propriety

                The smell of books, the slightly grainy touch of paper, the not-quite silence of a living but peaceful place, those were a few of the things that Blanc loved. She had them nearby now, along with a nice, hot cup of tea and a slice of lemon pie, always a favourite when it was snowing outside, as it almost always did.

                She also had the presence of _that_ woman. Not that she really minded, if one day they were to be honest with each other, they could admit what both already knew, but right now Vert was being a bit of a pest.

                Worse, she was doing it completely passively and probably even without being aware of it. Well, the day wasn't wasted, she was with Vert in her favourite book store, the one she knew better than the staff, the one with the tea salon with the quiet alcoves where there was no risk of anyone reading over your shoulder, the one with that hidden section with that enthusiastic young lady who had recommended books written under one of Blanc's _noms de plume_.

                Today, Blanc had been set on getting a few more books to study, so that she could acquire a few tricks to better her craft.

                The area she was trying to better was not planning plots – not that reading books gave you that skill – or writing interesting characters – for which she recommended knowing a quite few in real life, which she did, – it was writing smut properly.

                As it turned out, it was rather hard. She needed tricks and examples from classics and not-so-classics, boilerplate scenarios and highly uncommon situations, the familiar and the arcane. She needed to study and it was harder to gather study materials in the presence of someone she might, under the right conditions, call a loved one.

                Hence Vert was having a perfectly nice day in a warm and cosy haven and Blanc was having a perfectly nice day, with an objective burning a hole through her agenda.

                Vert had picked the tea, it was as wonderful as the name of the place it came from was unpronounceable, some lost valley in the mountains of the Greater Rim that circled the shadow of Celestia. The black leaves bordered on blue and had a hint of citrus to them.

                Her tea cup rattled just a little against her saucer. Vert hummed a wordless question.

                "It's nothing," said Blanc, too quickly, loudly proclaiming to the world in general and to Vert in particular that there was something.

                "Was there something you wanted to do?" Vert peered up from a very respectable thesis on the history of Planeptunian river boats in the classical era. Blanc suspected, almost knew, that it was just a disguise for something trashier than that. Not that she was one to speak.

                Blanc ate a bite or two from her lemon pie. It was as succulent as ever. But stalling for time wasn't going to help, she had definitely been uncovered. Well, she wasn't going to play the game where the other one has to guess what's wrong. That worked in rom-coms, in real life it was a highly-irritating trait. "I was planning to look for more books." That was a little abrupt, maybe she should give it a second pass. "I enjoy your company so much that I'm a bit off schedule for my… hobby." Vert knew the hobby well enough. "It doesn't really matter."

                She felt Vert's knee gently come to rest against her thigh. Blanc felt a little warmer. It was certainly just the radiator behind her, some people like to overcompensate for the weather outside. "Let me help you, then," she said, "It'll be fun." She straightened up, a bit oddly. "Unless I've made you miss an appointment, in which case I'm very sorry and –"

                "You didn't, I just wanted to go and pick some books up. Just..." Blanc ran out of things she found acceptable to say.

                "It's a good thing we're in here, isn't it?" said Vert. She took a sip from her tea cup.

                Blanc shot her an annoyed glance. She suspected that Vert had a fairly good idea of what she was looking for. She licked her lips. She had an idea. "I know you'll read it and I don't want to spoil your surprise?" That rising tone hadn't been there in her mind.

                "That was quite good, but you shouldn't need to ask me if your justification is good. And I'll read it over your shoulder like last time." Vert shifted herself so that she sat against Blanc, thighs sharing heat through several layers of cloth.

                Blanc sighed and took a look out of her alcove, it was her usual one, the isolated one, placed in an outcropping of the building over the frozen river. She looked back at Vert, gentle and elegant, as always. "I was going to grab something from the top floor here, not the common top floor, the top floor on top of the reserve that braces against the clock tower." Both women knew exactly what she was referring to.

                "Oh." Vert's ability to simply refuse to blush had amazing secondary effects, such as causing Blanc to blush instead. Vert shifted her hands on her copy of Planeptunian river transport, from Senet to Checkers, she was holding it a bit too close to her face. Very suspicious.

                "Tell me about those river boats."

                "Oh, it's fascinating, did you know that they kept the same structure for more than four millennia? Of course they were flat bottomed boats like everywhere else, but in Planeptune they had minimal framings and tied reed bundles to the sides, all the way from when it was the Land of Senet through the Royal Game of Ur all the way to the early checkers era. Including the construction ships for the water locks."

                Blanc felt her eyebrows rise in disbelief. She used the bench seat's back to prop herself up and looked over Vert's shoulder. It was, in fact, a history of river boats. Her mind boggled for a moment, but Vert was Vert, MMOs, tea parties, terrible smut and elegance, she was a complex woman.

                 And a fascinating one, as well. Blanc followed with interest the trajectory of Vert's financier from her plate to her mouth.

                No, not that Financier. That would be awkward.

                Her every move breathed an easy, innate grace, Blanc was tempted to call it a sign of her divine nature but she didn't have anything like that to show for hers. And that other Vert had apparently had the same even before she became a goddess. The world could be so unfair to older, wiser divinities, but, if she could keep watching Vert be, she would say that Vert's gift was also given to her.

                Blanc climbed the last steps to the floor-that-did-not-exist with a second helping of lemon pie and butterflies in her stomach, Vert was a few steps ahead, swaying her hips without a shred of shame, giving Blanc what would have been a great view if not for that goddess-damned coat that had been a present. Light filtered in from a small window and illuminated a greyish door with worn and flacking paint. There was, important detail, no panel hanging from a hook and marking it a private area.

                There was also the smell of that incense the employee often assigned up here liked. Blanc had mentally associated it with terrible literature with no possible redeeming value – such as hers, and a good number of her favourites – and was always a little startled when she found it elsewhere. Here it was in its natural habitat, it was not certain that it was putting her at ease. She put her beret back on, to make herself just a tiny bit taller, heard Vert giggle, cracked the door open and slipped through.

                There were quite a few people in the warm and inviting forbidden room, a few stood tall like Vert, out of confidence, or Blanc, out of a poly-centenarian dedication to not appear shorter than she was, but most were hunched over furtively, she crossed eyes with a huge, musclebound man, trying to make himself smaller than the shelves next to which he stood. He was quite red in the face, something that was probably helped by the tiny and excitable vendor trying to steer him towards other, possibly more depraved, works. While her voice was barely louder than a mouse's whisper, the motions of her hands were large and expressive and told Blanc too much about the man's tastes.

                Soon, Vert might know too much about hers too. Blanc's cold unease welled up though the warmth and she could feel her hair raising and cold sweat forming.

                Vert stepped next to her, took her hand and leaned down to ask, "What should we look for?"

                Her back to the metaphoric wall, Blanc blushed. She recognised that this wasn't going to improve her fate and paled instead. She decided to shift the problem on someone else: herself, a little further in the future. Blanc slipped a hand in her sleeve and fumbled for a moment before pulling out a piece of paper. Vert took it, read it, and pink dusted her cheeks, then progressed to an expansionist red.

                "Those are… eclectic research materials."

                Despite the great success that making Vert blush represented, Blanc felt only the warmth of shame.

                "Don't look like that." Vert sounded just a little bit terse, she grabbed Blanc's hand and dragged her to the closest secluded place she could find, namely, between the shady shelves of the "Tentacles, Ovipositors, Vines (Mechanical or otherwise), F/F" section. "Now, to find that…"

                Blanc looked at her feet, her face and ears felt as if on fire. Thank you, past Blanc, for inflicting this on her. She started when her beret popped off her head, right into a flick of Vert's fingers on her forehead. She felt her eyes water until Vert gave her a quick peck on the lips. A very surprised, tall and gangly woman with green eyes and hair like a haystack after a storm did her best not to fall on her derriere at this burst of activity.

                "Self-pity does not suit you." She slipped Blanc under her arm. "And liking trash does not make you trash." She took a brief pause to look at the list. "For the most part. And so long as the Doylist aspect of it being trash aren't too… critical. You know what I mean to say." Vert gently placed the beret back on Blanc's head before tucking her under her arm and against her chest. "So, those study materials." She looked at the shelves. "We'll need to find you better hiding spots for them that the current ones. If I can find them, your sisters soon will as well." Someone nearby failed at not falling on her derriere. Vert leaned in closer. "And we should perhaps get a couple more identities, maintaining propriety is difficult."

                Blanc put her arm around Vert's waist and voiced something approaching agreement. It sounded a strangled hum, but Vert understood anyway.

                "And I like MMOs, I don't have ground to stand on to shame anyone."

                "I'm not sure that's the worst of your taste," muttered Blanc, resting her head against Vert's side.

                A tall and gangly woman stood up quickly.

                Vert curled up a little around Blanc and brought her head closer to hers. "Come now, all four of us are perverts. You know what those two do together, don't you? They don't stop at the hand-holding stage."

                "What aisle are we in again?"

                "Tentacles, Ovipositors–"

                "How proper and delicate, almost like flower arranging. More than those two can even imagine."

                "I must confess that it is perhaps a little bit much, although imagine a delicious dryad in the woods, with all her love and her thin, supple, agile vines… "

                Blanc bit back Vert's name, not that people would make the connection, and muttered, "Don't even start."

                Ms Haystack Hair quickly slipped out of the aisle, clasping a few books to her – diminutive – bosom.

                "I'm told that our purple idiot has learned a lot from… the other purple idiot," whispered Vert, "we could perhaps find some inspiration there?" She pressed Blanc a bit closer. All that winter clothing really got in the way.

                Blanc hissed through her teeth, "How do you even know that?"

                "I challenged her to a little sparring at her place one day, she transformed and was wearing a copy of Plutia's suit. She learned a valuable lesson in picking the right clothes for the right occasion. I learned that maybe I also had the courage to…"

                Blanc put her arms around Vert's waist. "Hmm, just not here. Propriety you understand."

                "But of course."

**Author's Note:**

> Not my finest, but at least it's progress: words were written.


End file.
